There were internal and external problems. Clearly the rapid pace and complexity of web standards development is nearly impossible to keep up with. The original

There were internal and external problems. Clearly the rapid pace and complexity of web standards development is nearly impossible to keep up with. The original things which gave Firefox and advantage for regular users have been universally adopted. Fast performance, tabbed browsing, cross-platform support, and open source code were the main advantages. These are all standard now. The proprietary shims around the rendering engines invade privacy and limit user freedom, but clearly users don't care enough for it to influence their choices. They chose Firefox because it was convenient and worked better, and now that isn't true... Mainly because no amount of money they could throw at development could ever hope to compete with Big Tech. On the internal problem side, the recent batch of layoffs seem like the most egregious, particularly since they say they are continuing with gecko. If they decided that gecko is not worth maintaining anymore, that might be a wise strategic move, given external circumstances, albeit sad. But maintaining it while eliminating any hopeful future is the worst of all worlds. The salary growth of their top executives alone over the past 10 years could pay for Servo development. If they want to save money, that is where they should start. But killing gecko would save more. They would need to rework their whole business model, though. I think pioneering open cloud services would be great. No lock-in. Zero-knowledge. End-to-end encryption. Open source. They already have Firefox Accounts which tie in with Sync, Lockwise, VPN, Monitor, etc. If they add in OwnCloud, an Email service, and so on they could offer an attractive alternative to Google services.